For what is a highly personal medium, Wray’s approach to Twitter
is mostly impersonal. If he does happen to tweet as himself and
“let the mask slip”—as he put it in an email—he’ll eventually
delete the post. In his feed, there are few hashtags, few links and
no mentions of the misadventures of Charlie Sheen, Rebecca Black or
Wray himself.

I met up with him at the Flying Saucer Cafe in Brooklyn to
discuss the project. Here, in Wray’s own words, is a history of
his… Twovel?

On the project’s origins:
When my last novel came out [my publisher] rigorously suggested
that I start a Facebook account and a Twitter page. Since I always
do what they tell me, I said “okay.” I set up my Facebook page in a
pretty standard way, although I really never post on it. I’ve never
kept a diary ever in my life, essentially because it always
depressed me to just kind of look at the minutiae of my day, and I
had the same feeling a few times that I tried to do a status update
on Facebook. Like, you know, “time to get new high tops,” “that
Charlie Sheen, what a nut.” All of that stuff just kind of bummed
me out, so on Facebook I don’t really do that, I just parasitize
other people’s YouTube links and stuff. The same held true for
Twitter. Frankly, I didn’t want to tweet about myself so I decided
I was going to try and do some kind of fiction project.

I had this character I’d felt close to in my last novel
Lowboy, but who ended up being extraneous to that novel. I
saw some potential in him. I wanted a character who would clearly
be fictional, but also would be close enough to me at least in age
and background and demographic that if I wanted to give an opinion,
to crack a joke essentially as me on Twitter, I could just put the
words in his mouth. This character Citizen seemed to fit the bill
pretty well. He’s come a long way and changed quite a bit from the
role that he originally played in the novel.

What to call it:
It’s not really a novel, it’s not really a story. I don’t know
exactly what to call it. Eventually someone will come up with some
Internet-appropriate term for it, like a Twovel or something.
People don’t know what to call it and there are so few of them out
there it seems that I guess there’s no great need to come up with a
name.

The term ‘Twitter novel’ is problematic because it functions
very differently from a novel; it functions very differently from a
story; it functions very differently from a prose poem or a
paragraph. I think one reason why so many early attempts to write a
long-form fiction project in Twitter have tanked is that people
trying to write them simply transposed what they knew about writing
a novel or a short story into Twitter form. They didn’t think of it
as a distinct medium, a distinct genre. It does have very different
requirements, in my opinion. What I tried to do when I started out,
and what I’ve stuck to pretty much because it seems to work, is
viewing each tweet as something that both advances the story and is
self-contained. I think of each tweet as a set up and a punch
line—whether or not it’s a comic tweet. Most of them tend to be
because it’s fun to make jokes, and certainly the most successful
people on Twitter in my opinion by far are the comedians. I’m a big
fan of Sarah Silverman and Tim and Eric and Louis C.K. and all
sorts of people. I’ve found that the story of Citizen has become
more playful and more comedic as it has evolved.

Where it’s going:
I’ve had different ideas about that at different times. I haven’t
actually tweeted that often, the total number of tweets is
only—right now I think it’s 120. That was because after an initial
kind of excitement about it I just became distracted by other
things, but recently over the last month I’ve been getting back
into it again, I’m not exactly sure why. I think my friend Colson Whitehead, who’s a
very, very savvy and entertaining um, um—what’s the name for
someone who tweets again? There’s a new name, isn’t there? It’s a
terrible word—anyway, let’s say, person using Twitter, is just
clearly having a lot of fun with it. He’s doing something very
different with his Twitter page, but seeing what a success he’s
made of it kind of lit a fire under my ass a little bit. I’m not
sure whether a project on Twitter that doesn’t promote me as a
personality first and foremost has the same potential as what he
and other people are doing. It’s probably always going to be for a
specialized audience, but who knows? There does seem to be a
correlation between how often a person has tweeted and how many
people are paying attention, but then again I don’t really want to
overdo it.

His new band was derivative of a band that was
based on a band that had ripped off a band that had once, long ago,
had one regrettable idea.less than a
minute ago via webJohn
Wray
John_Wray

Wray has gone months without tweeting and then jumped right
back into the story.
That’s a way in which it’s slightly different from both an online
diary, the way many people use Twitter, and a novel or a fiction
project that might be made more difficult by taking long periods
off. To me, in a way the Citizen storyline is almost like a video
game like Grand Theft Auto or something. If you pause the game you
can go away indefinitely and then you come back to a certain
situation, a certain set of conditions that apply and you just kind
of reactivate your avatar and keep moving. I don’t know why I think
of it that way, but it seems to work that way. Unlike my novels, I
actually have no idea where the storyline is going and that’s what
I like about it.

Yesterday, my girlfriend was harassed by some drunken cheese
dicks on the street. I immediately thought, “well the next tweet I
do—he’s on the street anything can come his way—how about some
[guy] in a St. Patty’s Day t-shirt with green beer foam on his
chin.” So in a way, when I want to, I can acknowledge what’s
happening in real time in the story. I’ve considered having Citizen
comment on other things that are happening in pop culture and so
on, but in general I try not to do that because I don’t want to get
too close to what other people are doing on Twitter or people to
say, “oh Citizen is just John, that’s just him calling himself
that” because that’s not really what I wanted to do. But
occasionally something comes along. I really am trying to be
playful with it and not try to make too many rules for myself.

Wray uses typical Twitter style sparingly. He has hashtagged
twice—once #FatBoys and once #Drake.
That was a very deliberate experiment to see whether, for example
when hashtagging Drake, particularly since it was a diss, I was
curious as to whether some Drake fans would be like “fuck you” or
send me some hostile messages, but I guess Drake really is so soft
that his fans don’t exact retribution.

Now he’ll kill me.

He also, obviously, has to work within 140
characters.
The extreme restriction that it places—or I should say I think a
better way of putting it is—the extreme economy that that requires
of a writer. That is one of the most beneficial things from a
literary standpoint of the whole Twitter set up, because it really
forces you to consider what’s necessary and what’s not in a given
line of writing. The novel that I’m working on is huge and
sprawling, and the fact that Twitter’s format is so diametrically
opposed to that, it’s actually very healthy for me to realize how
much you can say in a very small space. That said 140 characters
really is outrageously constricting. I can’t tell you how many
times I’ve had a really good entry that was 180 or 176 or 168. 140
is just, that’s designed for basically two sentences, and I usually
find that the twist that I want to get into my tweets is best
served by three sentences and it’s very hard to fit three sentences
into a tweet. Especially because I decided from the very beginning
that I was going to write in complete sentences and I wasn’t going
to use any lols or omgs.

There’s always a temptation to get rid of an apostrophe or use
yr instead of your, but at the beginning I decided that I wanted
something that made no stylistic compromises. And it turns out you
can do it with a little bit of attention and care.

Citizen had two thoughts looking down at the
condom: 1 what a waste those things only get used once. 2 I am
destined for a life of solitude.less than a
minute ago via webJohn
Wray
John_Wray

If someone were to start following Wray on Twitter today he
or she would be dropped right in the middle of the Citizen story,
but, as Wray explained, it’s not necessary to read the entire
narrative to get caught up.
I think one of the successful things about the way I’m trying to do
it is that that’s really up to them. The situation is really so
straightforward: Citizen is just kind of a peculiar eccentric
character who is wandering around a city that may or may not be New
York and at times he seems little bit like someone you might want
to go sing karaoke with, at times he seems really creepy and the
sort of person you’d cross the street to avoid. I like not really
coming down on one side or the other and the idea of people forming
their own opinion. But really that’s the whole situation. Odd young
man on the loose in the city, that’s all it is. And I think you get
that in one or two tweets, and as I said I hope that most tweets
are entertaining or at least intriguing on their own. So of course
I think it would be fun for someone to go back and start at the
beginning or anywhere because there are some tweets I’m pretty
proud of earlier on that I would like people to read. It’s kind of
like a Choose Your Own Adventure. You could almost read it
backward.

Wray will riff on the same topic or keep Citizen in the same
scenario for repeated tweets.
If there’s a subject or a situation or a scene that seems fertile I
try not to rush through it. I don’t feel the need to change the
scene every day, because frankly nobody’s following it that
closely. They are getting these tweets in the middle of a bunch of
tweets about the future of e-books or about Charlie Sheen. They
probably don’t really remember what happened the day before so that
gives me a certain freedom to really stir the pot if I feel like
it.

Besides the lessons of working in a highly constrained
format, Twitter has taught Wray about “improvisation, really, and
spontaneity.”
I once asked Haruki Murakami about his process of writing and he
made me helplessly jealous by saying, “I get up early in the
morning I put on a ’50s bebop record and I just don’t know myself
what’s going to come out that day, I have no idea where my stories
are going.” I don’t think that I could write an actual novel that
way, but I have tried to put that into practice when writing
Citizen’s story, it’s worked really well. It’s been really fun and
liberating.

Though Wray has made the conscious decision not to Tweet
about himself, there are elements of his personality that are in
Citizen.
In so far as he’s connected to me, I guess he’d be more of a
caricature. Basically the things that he goes on his little rants
about, the things that he hates, like dreamcatchers and Uggs and
Drake, are actually things that annoy me. So in that regard he’s a
lot like me, but his more self-destructive side or his more
paranoid side I hope is not like me at least in my normal chemical
state.

I try to keep it free form enough that if something is on my
mind that I think it could be entertaining and I think it could
potentially fit into the aspect of me that is reflected in
Citizen’s character, I have the flexibility to work that in.
Because in writing a novel, you know, what you happen to be
thinking about that day is not necessarily appropriate to work in
there, so I definitely like the idea that if I want to go on a
little rant about the end of the world or something that I can have
Citizen do that for me.